Studio, Hackney, East London, 2022
"When I first met Adam Holmes-Davies in his studio last December, he showed me a work of his titled July Painting. It is a smallish picture in oil on linen, its surface depicting five yellow circles that variously disappear into and emerge from a colourful background of geometric shapes. Beneath its surface, the artist told me, are countless other images. In the years (and it did take years, I was told) that he spent on the work, many layers - some abstract, some figurative, some a combination of the two - were built up and scraped off or painted over. In July 2021, he stopped: it was finished. Its circles and shapes conceal the long list of experiments that sit beneath them in the same way that the work’s title flattens the time it took to create. Meeting Holmes-Davies, I learned about the doggedness and patience sometimes required to make, or perhaps find, the right image. I like to think that July Painting’s real subject is the many months and layers that came before July".
By Phin Jennings, writer and curator | 03 May 2023
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"In the studio with Adam Holmes-Davies and these new paintings...... A super-inspiring conversation about how paintings are made when a painter has no implicit sense of place or tradition for themselves (to be referred to or continued) and how painting (verb and noun) carries all of the thoughts and desires, frustrations and decisions into the picture, not to be 'read' but somehow bound into the accumulated skins and scrapings-back that forge the complex colours, porous edges, shapes and energies that snare casual glances and inspire slow looking.
Art History...it's there too, but it is another country, paintings are a part of those Histories, but they are not only those Histories.
Merlin James writes about David Jones' anxiety about the loss of the communicable power of the sign (in his pre-breakdown works) and who later entered into Freudian therapy, James asks if Jones might relate the possibilities of Freudian symbols with his concern foe 'traditional' signs:
'Would he have reflected that his earlier paintings, conveying to their audience, may never less have been operating upon the viewer in more subconscious ways?'
Stuff certainly goes in strange ways, and so little of it is actually linguistic".
By Dan Howard-Birt, writer, curator, artist | 10 December 2021
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"Simply put I am trying to express my experiences of life, sometimes quite literally I feel like I’m attempting to paint the experience of being sat in a little room trying to make sense of the world".
By Adam Holmes-Davies, Floor Magazine interview | 12 August 2016
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"The style of Adam Holmes-Davies work seems quite generic at first, but over time they reveal a compelling balance between very impulsive decisions and a refined kind of painterly tidying up. There's also something going on about terror and loss, something absent and unresolved that gets you back to look at them".
By Nigel Cooke, Michael Landy, Linda Norden | New Contemporaries, July 2007
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